Fred On Everything — Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed

Maribel Cuevas: A Great American

Damned Near The Only One, It Begins To Seem

July 25, 2005

Here, in the home of the free, the land of the brave, and suchlike prattle,
I encounter this: “An 11-year-old girl who threw a stone at a group of
boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault
charges in California. Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation
which involved three police cars and a helicopter.” *

It seems that the rock gashed the little monster’s forehead and, according
to the BBC, he needed “hospital treatment.” I suspect this means
that he needed treatment that any general practitioner could have given him
in his office, but ambulances don’t take people to general practitioners.

Now, if I had a son who was ganging up with other boys to torment a girl who
didn’t speak English, or did (apparently Maribel barely did), I’d
slap him across the room so hard that he would think he was an astronomer, and
the next time the idea of doing such a thing occurred to him, he would reflect,
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Dad doesn’t seem to like it."
No, Dad doesn’t. If he came home with a gash where she had belted him
in trying to defend herself, I’d say, “Son, you go to school to
learn things. You just did.” Ask and ye shall receive. Actions have consequences.
There are things kids need to know that you don’t do, especially boys,
who are pack animals.

I said, “Little monster.” In fairness, this isn’t fair.
Kids are mean—girls as much as boys, though they go about it differently.
A civilizing duty of parents, and of society, is to make clear that there are
limits, and what those limits are. One of those limits is that sorry little
jerks do not gang up on girls.

But…but…what leaves me gasping in wonderment is the police. First,
why the police at all? Schools and parents can’t manage children who haven’t
even reached adolescence? What is wrong with these absurd, weak, contemptible,
anemic larvae? I can be charitable to sniveling parsnips, yes. I mean, worms
are people too. But not when they run the schools like Oprah grubs from under
a rock.

When I was a kid in high school in rural Virginia, the principal, Larry Roller,
didn’t need cops to control a school full of rowdy country boys. These
were kids who could hurt you. They cut cordwood in the mornings. If you don’t
know what that means, you need to go to a gym. My girlfriend Gloria, pretty
as a flower, could pull a crab boat onto a mud flat by herself, and did. We
all had guns.

No serious discipline problems. Ever. Anywhere. The concept was like presidential
grammar: unheard of. Nobody bucked Chrome Dome Roller. Anyone who did would
have been expelled in three seconds, and would have known better than to go
home, ever. His father would be waiting.

How is it that the police department needs three squad cars, an ambulance,
and a freaking helicopter to subdue an annoyed girl of eleven? In my many years
of riding with the police, I knew them to be men, gutsy, hard-core, willing
to go to bad places full of bad people. You might like them or you might not,
and you might have reason either way. But they weren’t pansies.

Real cops would be stone embarrassed to arrest little girls on assault charges.
Not these cops, though.

Yet the use of police when frightened mushroomy little purported teachers
get upset is becoming the custom in American schools. I like this one:

“Yahoo News, Fri Apr 29: “CLOVIS, N.M. - A call about a possible
weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops,
close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito. Someone
called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped
into Marshall Junior High.”

Yeah. The kid, one Michael Morrissey, had made a thirty-inch burrito for some
sort of assigned project, presumably of preternatural stupidity and unrelated
to the purposes of school. Anyway, jalapeños, tomatoes, things like that.
Scary things.

Armed officers on rooftops? Snipers? I imagine the chief talking by radio
to a swatted-out rifleman.

Chief: “You see him, sergeant?”

Sniper: “Yessir. He’s got the weapon under his arm. It’s
wrapped in newspaper. I got a clear headshot. Do I have a green light?”

Chief: “No, not yet. If he does anything threatening….”

Sniper: “Hold on! Hold on! He’s unwrapping the weapon.”

Chief: “Green light! Take him out!”

Sniper. “Roger that. Wait. He’s eating it….”

If I were a cop, and had to take part in something so clownish, I wouldn’t
admit it. Instead I’d tell my wife I’d spent the afternoon in a
brothel.

These cockamamie stories are legion, like illiterate federal workers. I’ve
followed any number of them. A little boy swats a little girl on the backside
on the playground, and he is arrested by cops, charged with sexual harassment,
and put into compulsory psychiatric counseling. Another kid draws a picture
of a soldier with his rifle, and gets suspended. On and on.

What twisted circus of social decay is going on here? Have these people’s
minds, if any, been taken over by extragalactic flatworms? That is my guess.
We are seeing the first step toward cocooning us. They plan to feed us to their
starving wiggly populations on some croaking planet knee-deep in bloodsucking
phyla unknown to science. Gurgle gurgle glop.

I’m serious.

Now, I may not know what is really going on, but I sure as hell know what
is really not going on. None of this is about security. At least, it is not
about security in any sane way, having some minor three-generations-back relation
to reality. We are a nation frightened of our daughters of eleven? Are girl
kids that dangerous? Does any other country, anywhere, fear its daughters? Give
me a break.

It is truly weird. America, the most aggressive nation on the planet, the
grr, bowwow, woof superpower, is also the most timid. Sure, I know,
aggressive because frightened, the bully terrified by sock-puppets that might
wait in the closet. But, my god, a kid with a burrito? In Mexico, where I live,
lots of kids have burritos. You can carry one, concealed, without a permit.
No helicopters and no snipers.

That’s us. The country of Davy Crockett, John Singleton Mosby, Apollo
Thirteen, now somehow scared of our own sprats, unable to teach them to read,
absolutely absurd in the eyes of the world. Of course,the schools being what
they are, lots of us have never heard of the world. It wasn't always this way.
Anyway, I guess the Chinese will be merciful. Maybe they will put us in special
homes, with soft walls.

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